Language in Inter-Action
"Language is used for doing things." My time studying Language in Inter-Action was perhaps one of the most enlightening periods of my life. It coincided with receiving my autism diagnosis, and I learnt a great deal about myself, others, and the social world during. The module is built around the philosophies of the psycholinguist Herbert H. Clark. The first few weeks were dedicated to reading Using Language (1996)Clark, H. H. (1996) Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., a textbook full of essays on social interaction, with each chapter building upon the insight gleaned from the last. As a conversation analyst, this idea of cumulation – of one thing paving the way for the next – applies at all sorts of levels, from the ordinary to the extraordinary – I have to catch your attention before I can borrow your pen; politicians have to campaign before they can be prime-minister. Most things can only get done by getting other things done before them (it is this notion which provided the basis for Attwood & Merrison (2017)Attwood, H. & Merrison, A. J. (2017) “Okay, what comes after that?” Investigating ‘nth-position (subsequent) action’ in workplace talk from socio-pragmatic and conversation analytic perspectives (because 1 + 1 > 2). iMean5: Bristol. at iMean5). As social beings, we are remarkably adept at keeping track of multiple things in conversation, at putting one thing on hold in order to solve another, only to return to the first seamlessly, with apparent effortlessness. During this module, one assignment required the coding of these things (called exchanges) in a portion of interaction. This broadly meant dissecting the talk, assigning numbers to each of the new 'exchanges' and keeping track of which exchanges were still occurring whilst a new one had begun. It ended up looking like this: Around the same time, an old friend of mine who studies computer science was working on an assignment on computer coding, and I recall us drawing parallels between our work, despite coming from two very different fields. Again, I was taken aback by how systematic and orderly interaction can be. The concept of coding was introduced to me through a metaphor of sorts, something like the following: You're making toast and a cup of tea, and want them both to be ready at the same time. Write each every step. So you might think it would go something like this: # Put kettle on # Put bread in toaster # Wait # Make tea # Butter toast The ability to do this sort of activity requires something called executive function – the ability to organise and act on information. Executive function is what enables people to plan, prioritise, initiate and organise the smaller tasks which make up larger tasks, and is thought to be what allows us to cope with new situations to which we cannot simply apply learned schema. Of course, there is another side to this – executive dys''function, often a part of autism. When someone's executive function is impaired, their ability to organise information and then regulate it is impaired, and so the same task of making toast and a cup of tea becomes much more complicated: Many of the traits of autism can be linked to executive dysfunction, and Hill states that "the behaviour problems addressed by this theory are rigidity and perseveration, being explained by a poverty in the initiation of new non-routine actions and the tendency to be stuck in a given task set.Hill, E. L. (2004) Evaluating the theory of executive dysfunction in autism. ''Developmental review, Vol. 24(2), pp. 189–233. " I often find myself in conversations where I have to start my utterances over because I have not quite laid the groundwork for the utterance to follow.